Thu May 01, 2014 at 16:22:58 PM EDT

This morning the local university's student newspaper this morning Tweeted out a comment by CMU president George Ross on the occassion of the CMU Board meeting to discuss tuition for next year.

Ross on potential tuition hike: Declines in state appropriations, increases in staff & admin salaries make higher ed more costly than ever.

This afternoon, they hiked tuition almost 3 percent, to $385 a credit hour. This prompted a bunch of people on social media to discuss tuition when they were in school. To get an idea how much it's shot up. in-state tuition was $324 an hour in 2008 and in 2004 was ... $179 a credit hour. The president explained the state side of this through another Tweet from CM Life.

Ross: State support was 75 percent of CMU's budget a few years ago. Now that number is just 17 percent.

So, CMU is swiftly becoming a private school with very little support in its general budget from the state, going from paying three-quarters of the university's expenses to less than 20 percent. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the president himself regularly receives pay raises and wants to squeeze extra perks, so he's actually part of the problem. The bigger part of the problem, however, is that state disinvestment in higher education. The state as a whole is now spending more than 25 percent less on higher education today than it did in 2008. There's another chart at the same report that shows that students now pay 21 percent more of the costs for their education than they were before The Great Recession.

Kids are told that they need to get a degree. Contrary to what rightwingers would have you believe, it's not because higher education is a racket and a bubble. It's because you can't get a good job without a degree. Once they get there, they find that the state decided to invest in tax cuts for rich people rather than the future (college students), and they need to borrow a bunch of money to afford to attend school, and they graduate with a bunch of debt in exchange for the possibility of decent work. Of course, all that debt means foregoing buying a car and living on their own, but we can safely address that by ridiculing millenials as the first generation that doesn't want to leave home.

Update! ... A broadcasting professor who chewed some of the same undegrad turf as me shared this chart, showing how tuition at CMU has quadrupled in 20 years, going from $85 my senior year to today's $385 a credit hour. Mind you, CMU still markets itself as one of the more affordable universities, so it's an across-the-board thing.